Tokyo Story 2013 Part 3 “Identities In The World”

This event has ended.

Each year, over a hundred artists take part in the Tokyo Wonder Site (TWS) residency program, engaging in various artistic activities both in Japan and abroad. This year, TWS is hosting “Tokyo Story 2013,” a relay-style exhibition that will report on the results of last year’s participating artists. “Identities In The World” comprises the the third stage of the project. The exhibit introduces the works of five artists: Kosuke Ikeda and Yuki Okumura, who were sent abroad on the Exchange Residency Program, and Noor Abu Arafeh of Palestine, Mohamed Abdelkarim of Egypt, and Sutthirat Supaparinya of Thailand, who were invited to take part in TWS’s Creator-in-Residence program in Tokyo.

After the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, everyone in Japan was forced to recognize just how much our day-to-day lives are influenced by the electrical power supply. At the same time, there are “currents” in the world—such as politics and history—that are much larger than the power of any individual. With this in mind, these five artists have taken up themes of “energy” and “identity” in an attempt to express how their own existences greatly depend on their surrounding environments, in some cases going through personal transformations by actively plunging into these issues. The creators sometimes observe themselves objectively and sometimes reach into the deeper recesses of their consciousnesses.